Via Presstv (with video, ish):
“The government of Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has survived a no confidence vote, hours after the president asked him to step down.
The motion got 194 votes in the Verkhovna Rada on Tuesday, falling short of the 226 votes required to oust the prime minister.
Earlier protesters rallied outside the parliament in Kiev calling for the resignation of Yatsenyuk over what they perceive to be his government’s failure to fight graft.
The protest was organized by the Ukrainian nationalist Svoboda party and the Party of Ordinary People.
Yatsenyuk’s government has come under increased pressure due to allegations of corruption and the slow pace of reforms.
Meantime, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called on Yatsenyuk and the country’s controversial prosecutor general to resign because both had lost the public’s trust.
“In order to restore trust in the government, the president asked the prosecutor general and the prime minister to quit,” presidential spokesman Svyatoslav Tsegolko wrote in social media on Tuesday.
Yatsenyuk was a leading figure during Ukraine’s 2014 pro-EU changes and vowed to clean up the government by cutting its ties to shadowy tycoons.
Soon, however, people accused the former banker of defending the interests of the very same billionaires he had vowed to sideline.
A former lawmaker accused a close Yatsenyuk associate in December of receiving a massive bribe for giving the Czech company Skoda the right to provide equipment for Ukraine’s nuclear power plants.” [snip]
Ukraine’s biggest political party said on Tuesday it will rate the performance of Yatsenyuk’s government as “unsatisfactory” in an imminent vote that could precipitate a collapse of the coalition government and snap election.
The risk of the Ukrainian government falling also threatens a massive IMF-led rescue package aimed at reviving the country’s shattered economy and slashing its reliance on Russian financial support. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that it may withhold aid to Ukraine if it does not carry out anti-corruption reforms.”
The final graph I’d probablynot put much stock in…so to speak.
Now there’ve been plenty of Rumbles in the Rada over the past couple years, as well as Maidans 2.0, 3.0, etc., in which those same Right Sectorians and Svabodans marched, rumbled, and burned tires and such.
But one has to wonder if the IMF may have…er…suggested who the US puppet fall guy should be. Clearly the West hasn’t totally given up on the Chocolate King, even though the buzz in May of 2015 was that
“The disastrous condition of Ukraine’s economy must also be focusing minds. The private intelligence company Stratfor, known as the ‘shadow CIA,’ noted that Nuland’s visit to Moscow “is the latest indicator” that Washington’s position on Ukraine and its role in the country’s future “may be shifting.”
After 18 months of ludicrously soft-soaping the regime, even the US mainstream press is suddenly highlighting Kiev’s problems with corruption. This increases the likelihood that Nuland has had a Damascene moment. It’s hard to imagine the US’ lap dog corporate media straying too far from the State Department line.”
But I digress. I’d poked around for other versions of Yats’s government having barely survived a confidence vote, and yeppers, the Guardian had one yesterday, but gosh…there was no mention of Svoboda, fancy that.
I checked again this morning morning and found this brilliant Guardian editorial board opinion: ‘The Guardian view on Ukraine’s crisis: take the long view; Economic and political instability in Kiev is getting worse and Russia is poised to take advantage. But that’s no reason for doing nothing. On the contrary’
“That Ukraine’s path towards something approximating to liberal democracy would be winding and difficult was always obvious.” (ho ho ha ha hee hee)
That its 40 million people have shown a lot of resilience in trying to reach that goal must, however, not be forgotten. As Kiev finds itself on the brink of a new political crisis, with its government surviving a vote of no-confidence, and the war still grinding on in the east, it is important to recall the wider historical backdrop.”
(Long anti-Russian rant,then):
“Two years after the Maidan revolution, Ukraine’s slow pace of reform has without doubt created public frustration. The economy has tanked and the prime minister’s approval ratings have plummeted. Reformists in the government have struggled to overcome the deeply vested interests of oligarchic groups. Changes within the bureaucracy and the administration have been dismally insufficient. If the internal crisis continues, Ukraine’s backers will find themselves with new headaches. The International Monetary Fund has warned that a $40bn bailout might be put at risk.
A deepening political crisis in Ukraine could threaten the Minsk ceasefire agreements, whose full implementation (which was initially planned for December 2015) had already been pushed back to an uncertain date this year. While each side in the conflict accuses the other of not fulfilling its commitments, political events in Kiev could offer Russia a new pretext to refuse handing over the control of the border to the central government. The OSCE has recently spoken of “circumstantial evidence” that Russia is rearming the separatists.
(A bit like the UK report that ‘it’s likely that Putin ordered Litvinienko poisoned’, eh?)
“For all this, developments in Ukraine point to the need for more, not less, western and European focus. Both international financial assistance and diplomatic efforts should be kept on track if Ukraine is to be able to stabilise. With all the other problems facing Europe, that may be a hard sell. But it is in Europe’s interest to engage, not turn away.”
No mention of how freaking embarrassing it is that the Ukrainians can’t get their shite together, but had there been, it would have been: because Roosia. No mention that it’s the Ukrainian militias who don’t honor the cease-fire, nor any mention of how important Ukraine is to US and Western bidness, or acting as proxies against Roosia, and NATO’s willingness for the ‘benighted nation’ to be placed under the NATO umbrella.
Looking around for other ‘opinions and facts’ about this kerfuffle, I found this interesting musing at Russia-Insider:
“As it was Yatsenyuk survived the no confidence vote as only 194 MPs out of a total of 422 voted to oust him.
An interesting fact is that MPs of the Opposition Bloc (the remnants of Yanukovich’s Party of Regions) largely did not vote to oust Yatsenyuk. Just 8 ouf of 43 did so. Which is to say it was within the power of Opposition Bloc to unseat him, but they chose not to.
We wonder why? Is it the case they decided they don’t want to give Poroshenko what he wants, especially as what he wants lately appears to be a government headed by Georgia’s ex-president Mikhail Saakashvili who is most famous for starting a war with Russia and cracking down on the opposition.”
Yay-uss; you’ll of course remember John MCain barking in 2008: “Today we are all Georgians!’. But oopsie, from The Guardian in Sept., 2009:
“Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili blamed for starting Russian war : EU investigation says Tbilisi launched indiscriminate assault on South Ossetia • Inquiry accuses both sides in five-day conflict of breaking laws of war
Who knows how many Western businesses have ‘invested in Ukraine’ by now, and likely have received some sweetheart deals. But it seems now that the original reason Monsanto had given to invest in Ukraine so heavily (as in: to develop non-GMO seeds and crops for the European market) was mooted in 2013. Joyce Nelson at Counterpunch:
“Finally, a little-known aspect of the crisis in Ukraine is receiving some international attention. On July 28, the California-based Oakland Institute released a report revealing that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), under terms of their $17 billion loan to Ukraine, would open that country to genetically-modified (GM) crops and genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture. The report is entitled “Walking on the West Side: the World Bank and the IMF in the Ukraine Conflict.”
It’s a long piece in which she unravels a lot of the related bidness schemes at play, and sadly her links to the report are broken, but this is key:
“The U.S.-Ukraine Business Council’s 16-member Executive Committee is packed with U.S. agribusiness companies, including representatives from Monsanto, John Deere, DuPont Pioneer, Eli Lilly, and Cargill. [12] The Council’s twenty “senior Advisors” include James Greene (Former Head of NATO Liason Office Ukraine); Ariel Cohen (Senior Research Fellow for The Heritage Foundation); Leonid Kozachenko (President of the Ukrainian Agrarian Confederation); six former U.S. Ambassadors to Ukraine, and the former ambassador of Ukraine to the U.S., Oleh Shamshur.”
Then there’s Hunter Biden the youngest son of Vice President Joe Biden, who’d been appointed to the board of directors of Ukraine’s largest private-gas producer, Burisma Holdings, as head of the legal unit. The WH had said: shut up there’s zero conflict of interest here. Certainly nothing out of the ordinary, at any rate. ;-)
On edit: I’d seen this JP Sotille interview on his Twitter feed, but hadn’t watched. He has a lot more on US-based multinational investment in Ukraine.
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On a more somber note, this link may be the Russian documentaries on atrocities in the Donbass juliania had mentioned. At Russia-Insider: ‘Circles of Hell: Shocking Film of Ukraine War Crimes, Sadistic Torture (Video)’; Torturing for the fun of it – a new film by a Russian NGO documents heinous crimes in eastern Ukraine
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
“Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and other explosive ordnance have become a deadly part of the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian troops and NATO Allies work together to stop them.”
if i hyperlink the Tweet, you may be able to see the great comments below it, the brave souls.
;-)
http://www.transparency.org/
the NGO sector. bad vlad make ukraine bad. make ukraine spend pennies in way imf/world bank not like, aka “corruption.” transparency.org make report on countries not do what imf/world bank say. National Endowment for Democracy & Open Society pay for transparency. transparency.org put up pix of people suffering from “corruption,” like in post-communist ukraine.
and google transparency.org’s donor list if you don’t believe me that this well-oiled machine is well-oiled w/oil wells of neo-lib moolah bill gatesian bono-esque NED green.
heh. good catch, jason. i filtered, and their Roosia and putin pages are shorter than i’d figured, but it seems to be newish? googled donors in a general query, but might open secrets have it, or is that just for campaign bucks?
yeah, i find it fun that yats gotta go, poroshenko must be and okey-dokey gazillionaire. man, that nation is ripe for the pluckin’, and wooot! whats about to pop in ‘C-you-in-CUBA’
oh, and the US of Apes got one hit: Obama’s open society or some such hilarity.
bugger; the filters don’t kick up an url. but one hit was fun as all giddy-up:
http://www.transparency.org/news/pressrelease/20121219_international_ngos_call_for_end_to_russian_crack_down_on_civil_soc
there’s the bombing campaign of syria (better syria than leningrad, amirite?), there’s the ‘crisis’ in ukraine, and there’s nato’s pivot to the baltics….crimea, crimea….some of this shite w/the rusky been going on a long time….
is there anything left UN-bombed in syria by now? srsly. oh, well, burundi’s in the news again. eritrea (they want in nato, too, and NATO says: they’re making strides toward their goal (x% of gdp for military budget). south sudan, as you’d mentioned earlier (clooney, or is south sudan jolie?)
a head’s up: i think i’ll put a post up about it, but independent lens is airing ‘The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution’, a documentary by Stanley Nelson this week, maybe others, and it is seriously mind-blowing, at least to me. what i hadn’t known about the panthers is epic. two hours, but they show you how to find it on one of your local pbs stations.
anything i’d mention that shocked me would be a whatchcallit: spoiler.
and O’s ‘pivot to the south china seas’ of course. oooof: China sends missiles to contested island Say US, Taiwan; Obama urges restraint !!!!
http://www.thedailystar.net/backpage/china-puts-missiles-disputed-island-573898
…an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/troilus_cressida/troilus_cressida.1.3.html
zounds, yer a well-read mofo w/ an incredible memory. might i rent some of your head-space, please?
ooof, and the only agememnon tales i’d read were by aeschylus, so i got held up reading…and checking my feeble memory. more later, mayhaps, but the wolf as universal prey again reminded me of david grossman’s ‘killology’…and that was indeed operative in a parallel way during the pnther era, no? sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs, the fuckwad.
https://www.usconcealedcarry.com/bulletproof-mind/
The US is playing w/this desire to make “an universal prey” w/o self-destruction (“and last eat up himself.”)
millions of men perpetrated against one another so great a mass of crime – fraud, swindling, robbery, forgery, issue of counterfeit money, plunder, incendiarism and murder – that the annals of all the criminal courts of the world could not muster such a sum of wickedness in whole centuries, though the men who committed those deeds did not at that time look on them as crimes-Tolstoy, W&P. (I like the counterfeit money part, makes me think of QE2, TARP & other shenanigans from the fed reserve & congress but i suppose the conventions of the 19th c. novel make it indecorous to mention a crime ubiquitous in war: rape.)
i don’t understand why europe’s leaders have hitched their wagon to the fading US star. can’t they see that the US is interested in creating chaos for its own sake, the dis-integration of the EU, much less preventing the integration of Russia & Europe, is the goal? that the noblest thing in the whole sordid Ukraine mess is US efforts to ram GMO’s down Europe’s throats?
i might need some enlightenment on this point, but there seems to be a tension b/n the quest for money (e.g., via Russia’s natural resources) and the quest for power (e.g., what good are riches w/o control?) Europe’s leaders could partner up w/russia & the same fat cat swine will get rich in europe & russia that are getting rich now. But they’d have to partner w/russia rather attempt to dominate. and ditch or snub the US.
so, maybe to prevent this from happening, what does the US give Europe in manufacturing conflicts w/Russia? The Security State: NATO’s weapons also work well against the working class. The US gives its partners in Europe both the means & the ideology for crushing its own populace.
All the while, Europe still needs gas so there’s plenty o’ bizness to wheel & deal in Russia.
THD could answer your geopolitical questions, but iirc he’d said once that germany could easily make trade alliances with russia, but don’t hold me to quoting him correctly.
as to goals being power or money, they’re certainly directly entwined in a capitalist system, and state capitalism as well. and aren’t some of the new bidness dealings announced often in rather coy manners? putin and israel recently, for instance, and i wish i could remember the headline i’d seen.
as far as russian gas, i swear it’s hard to believe any of the msn outlets, as they all are scribes to the Empire. rt said they’d even been giving it to ukraine again, no? or is that old news? but blocking the pipelines that aren’t controlled by ‘friends of NATO’ is a big deal, isn’t it? and new silk roads, etc., though i’m so poor at geography i need maps to grasp it all.
the many headlines hinting that the EU could actually break up: do you know if it’s for real? brexit will come to a vote soon, but the rest? oh, and i did poke around for info on the list of speakers and yani’s berlin conference, and yes, their prie mission seems to be to keep the EU from disintegrating. a new better bidness bureau, EU style? i loved and was surprised that pepe escobar seemed to applauding it all in once essay, but the fun thing was his raucous stage-setting with the pantheon f greek deities; it really is/was a treat.
my guess is that he’d switched from tequila to ouzo to pen it,
ah, different that tolstoy’s pithy passage, but it made me think of jonathan swift:
“(in lilliput) Deceit is considered worse than theft, because honest people are more vulnerable to liars than to thieves, since commerce requires people to trust one another. The law provides not only for punishment but also for rewards of special titles and privileges for good behavior.”
which reminds us that during the 2007-08 crash, so many banksters had been so corrupt and such lying liars, that none of the trusted the others, even making potential takeovers and mergers insanely unpredictable. no one knew the value of any of the dirty derivatives…goddam, yes, the bailouts and then QE funny money. and again, the pretense that it’s okay on wall street…but it ain’t, just the media trying to calm the waters so people…shop.
but whatever problems there are: it’ all the fault of china and putin.
Since wendyedavis tagged me, I’ll give your question a try. First of all geopolitics is not physics; alignment of forces still involve a lot of inertia of the status quo. Large and cumbersome arrangements do not easily change quickly and not for light reasons. European institutions, especially in the corporate sector, have not forgotten that Stalin’s Second International was aimed at subverting their power; that’s a 80-to-90 year-old institutional memory. Many Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Bulgarians have family and personal memories of Soviet imperialism over their countries. Those memories are reflected through the center and center-right parties that currently dominate many of those countries.
The second thing is that the NATO military leadership in the US started very early building social networks between the people who would have to operate together, down to the junior officer level. Over the 67 years that NATO has been in operation, those relationships have built a similar way of thinking and close friendships between the general staff of Western European militaries. Since the Cold War, this network has been extended to the general staffs for the former Soviet-occupied countries, who are now the most anti-Russian in the alliance. The real question is as it was in 2012, what is the purpose of NATO? In the past three years, the answer has reverted to the old one; it is an anti-Russian alliance envisioned to prevent Russia and China from consolidating power across Eurasia from Vladivostok and Harbin to Lisbon and Galway.
The logic behind this comes from Sir Halford Mackinder’s (https://archive.org/details/texts?and%5B%5D=halford%20mackinder) “The Geographical Pivot of History” in the 1919 book Democratic Ideals and reality: a study in the politics of reconstruction still offered by the 1996 reprint by the National Defence University Press. This became the post-World War I thinking among the US and UK, and it became orthodoxy in the West after World War II. It plays an immense role in George Orwell’s 1984. This well-taught international relations theory has captured the minds of the educated. It is a recipe for land force gigantism in the Eurasian nations and naval gigantism and forward deployment in the Oceanic nations. Indeed, “We have always been at war with Eurasia.” In the terms of Alcoholics Anonymous, it is just a form of stinking thinking. But it persists, and will allow China’s New Silk Road infrastructure to eventually freak out the American public when trade is extended to Western Europe.
And since World War II, corporations have become transnational, linking the powers-that-be in Europe with the powers-that-be in the US, who meet annually in the Davos World Economic Forum. So any geoeconomic strategy is coordinated across Europe, Japan, Korea and other transnational hubs hooked into NATO. Unlike the days of Halford Mackinder, it is the corporations driving the “democratic” governments instead of the aristocrats and individual industrialists driving industrial policy and military geopolitics. And it is the military strategists (i.e. staff for managers with shoulder boards) who are most enamored of Mackinder’s logic.
As for criminality, any criminality at all with war is a very recent thing, the first Geneva Convention, the initial project protecting the wounded by the International Red Cross, formed in 1863, being the first of protective international laws, being ratified in 1864. The nature of modern total war as exposed in the Crimean War and the US Civil War is what motivated the beginning of a fledgling peace movement that had its start among Unitarians and Universalists in Massachusetts responding to the Mexican War. What international law as exists to restrain war is a recent and haphazard thing, never really applied to a great power successfully. Europeans are no greater angels in this regard as the disposition of the the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles shows with the winding down of the British Empire. And the US and other nations aligned with the UK as the UK shed itself of its empire and the US took its place at the end of World War II. Protectorates do not quickly drop their tributary status to failing empires.
Distinguishing among NATO, the European Union, and the Eurozone Financial Union is important in looking at the relations of European countries. They involve overlapping but different European countries. And with the devolution of the Secretary-General of NATO to European politicians, NATO is not quite the instrument of empire that it used to be, but it still is the instrument of Western transnational corporations. However, an outbreak of hypernationalism of the kind promoted by various National Party manifestations in Europe could create the conditions for the breaking up of all three of those institutions. And that could as easily disrupt the seventy-year peace in Europe as it could free European nations from Uncle Sugar. The fear of that chaos is at the base of what holds Europe in the US orbit, not matter how much chaos it creates on the periphery of Europe.
US policy is not uniquely Obama’s; in fact the presence of Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland at the center of the Ukraine regime change, appointed by Hillary Clinton after serving other places in the Bush administration and the Clinton administration and the previous Bush administration shows that continuity that appointing Foreign Service officers gives the US. That her husband and his brother and father were key players in the Project for a New American Century only emphasizes that continuity that goes back through the Dulles brothers to their mentors from the McKinley administration. Ukraine was a replay of Cuba 1898. The play even goes back to James Polk. Or to Thomas Jefferson himself, who bought from Napoleon what Napoleon no longer owned in terms of military control and used the US military and immigrant settlers to force the reality of the US claims and not the claims of the indigenous tribes who had moved there in response to the European disruption of societies on the Eastern seaboard. The current situation is not the exception a lot of progressives feel it to be. The frontier created the balance by which the powers-that-be could survive and dominate white former indentured servants, transported debtors, and transported criminals, Africans enslaved and transported, and changing indigenous coalitions of towns even though each of those groups significantly outnumbered the powers-that-be. Class and identity in the politics from the 1670s onward. Theft of land, theft of labor, and domination of money from the beginning. Why should its extension to the edge of Eurasia be any different than its extension across the Mississippi River. As long as there are commodities, it works.
plus ca change…one quibble: the notion of “laws of war” didn’t start in the 19th c. a tree is not a man that you should cut it down, as the deuteronomist instructs, referring to siege warfare. (referenced in the wiki article on law of war, along w/hindu & muslim texts.)
i can see how these complex, interlocking bureaucracies, far-flung across and integrated into all europe, would be resistant to change keeping NATO afloat is no doubt Job Numero Uno.
Not the law of war as an idea, but the law of war as the current modern institution that has given us a bunch of yet imperfect institutions like the international criminal court, a host of advocacy organization of varying quality, and some limited experience in the actual prosecution of recognized war criminals in a still definitely selective and biased way that holds harmless major powers (and not just the US).
Not just plus ca change. Each culture has its own flavor of how it does empire and all that comes with that and each zeitgeist introduces its own tones. The US origin as a European colony displacing indigenous peoples and using slaves imported from Africa for their labor created a specific set of security problems for the plantation owners that shaped the US military institutions and military history. The fact that the US empire came to power with the integration of basic science into a war effort in a massive way was the zeitgeist tone added to this that allowed and made a necessity of forward deployment of troops and materiel, capabilities to duplicate operations like the Berlin airlift, and reliance of technologies that reduce US military casualties and in general increase civilian casualties.
Thus although there are moderately lower risks of nuclear war among the nuclear powers, although the number of conventional wars worldwide is the lowest in some decades, the very presence of asymmetric warfare that can put two people with a few guns in US territory killing a dozen people makes the US public very, very afraid. In a moment in which it is politically possible internationally to have some dramatic reductions in nuclear weapons between the US, Russia, and China, it is no longer politically possible domestically in the US for that to happen. The same with the remaining five chemical biological weapons nations; the US “defensive” stockpile (from whence came the biological Amerithrax attack on Senators Daschle and Leahy) are the US excuse that the current Congress will never eliminate.
The historical path does shape the social process by which the current situation evolved. The specifics are important.
Job numero uno. What exactly happens to military jobs and contracts if peace breaks out? What proportion is that of the US and European economies (it extends to corporations like BAE and Airbus, for example).
What happens to those workers if the government has a policy of austerity? It’s not just the high muck-de-mucks in NATO, the EU, Eurobanks, and national militaries who are threatened; its the line and staff from top to bottom of those institutions plus their families, and that gets the additional political support of their relatives and sympathetic members of their social networks. That’s quite a constituency for war and for being a part of the US empire.
oh, and from julian assange (i’ll link to it, too, so the comments below are visible):
but no calls to r2p bahrain, on accoutta ‘partners in peace’…and the U fifth fleet’s anchored there. just ‘more progress needed’, VOA, others as well. sunni-shia divides are minimized so small they can be drowned in a bathtub.
i suppose i should not be fast & loose w/words like “money, wealth, riches,” and “power”. what is power? that’s the tricky one. in any case, just b/c a year from now we may be in ww3 doesn’t mean israel & russia or russia & germany can’t pursue bizness deals today. the threat of nukular annihilation never prevented a true entrepeneur from making a buck. in the grand global game of RISK they are playing, aren’t bizness deals part of the strategy of warfare?
Tolstoy published W&P in 1865. I wonder if he was following the US Civil War, which made Napoleon’s bloodshed seem quaint. Old Scratch is laughing his pointy-tailed ass off that 70,000 dead in a single day at austerlitz or wherever in 1812 represented an era of innocence & childhood compared w/what was to come. They were still using muskets & swords!
amnesty int’l…ugh. i haven’t been following the brexit thing too much. europe is staggeringly wealthy. after the war, the US & Britain attempted to “seed” the various gov’t bureaus of europe, esp. intelligence & police services, with….ding ding ding, you guessed it: Nazis. Nazis are the best anti-communists, after all, and make damn fine cops. bulwarks against bolshevism in the cabinets, gov’t bureaus and foreign services of W. Europe. The Nazis never really left Paris, that kind of thing. which is why, or partly why, in an economy of nigh limitless possibility, concentration camps for refugees are inevitable. and worse. Europe just participated pell mell in the destruction of the countries from which these refugees are fleeing. They are all war refugees. European gov’ts share responsibility for the situation in Ukraine.
not sure where i’m going w/that ramble-fest, so OT and apropos of nothing, but i tho’t you’d like the quote wendy: “We can never have enough of nature. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.” – Walden. as a good american, the 1st thing i think of w/”life pasturing freely” is a big teddy roosevelt size gun. and piles of carcasses. The 2nd thing is a gigantic parking lot for a super-sized WalMart, a Hyper Mart or what you call it. ain’t that america? capitalism is one big nature-nausea reinforcement class.)
well, it seems to me that those in search of wealth and the conspicuous trinkets/gadgets that come with them most often use that wealth to make certain that they can buy the laws that further enable their predation of resources, worker-slaves, and tax avoidance. my theory is that they’re in effect trying to fill the empty spaces inside, not even knowing what an inner-life might look like. only the scale matters, in my estimation; i have a finally-estranged sister like that.
now sometimes the thrill can evolve into say, a hostile take-over of a company, selling off anything of value, firing all the employees (destroying their pensions, etc.) because they’re sadists. now the US and perhaps other nations, use their power, especially military, just to make sure some other nation doesn’t get the resources they might want one day. a different sort of hedge, but i see that in spades in africa and the global south, even down to setting up bidness-friendly puppet governments and nuking socialist governments.
now when i read the thoreau quote and “pasturing freely”, i luckily at first see the national parks system, wilderness areas, and other federally protected areas (national monuments), stuart udall, the curmudgeonly ed abbey, and all the folks who spent their lives trying to protect and defend natural areas. but then the mountain and desert west have loads of those, and weve hiked and camped in loads of them.
but yeah, teddy was a mixed bag, but still… every day out here you hear or read the patriots advocating that all that land go back to the states to…well, you know: plunder and rape because: federal government bad.
but as an aside, or mebbe not, a third giant plastic garbage patch floating around was recently identified, and some masochistic souls even began taking portions of it apart to see what was really there. un-fucking-believable. and of course as the plastics degrade in the sun, they make a slime cover over coral reefs, yada, yada…and choke off life. it just didn’t have to be this way, did it? but yeppers, folks say that marx maintained that capitalism contained the seeds of it own destruction, and i’d guess that’s what’s about to hit the fan, although the oligarchs figure they can find a way to survive.
gmo’s and the eu; i forget if i stuck this in; i found it while looking at my word doc on Big Greens:
“The European Commission is currently considering a list of new GM techniques, including oligonucleotide-directed mutagenesis; zinc finger nuclease technology; cisgenesis and intragenesis; grafting; agroinfiltration; RNA-dependent DNA methylation (RdDM); and reverse breeding. The report argues that, like kids trying to manipulate their parents, companies specializing in genetic modification are resorting to calling their products “chocolate” rather than “candy” in a bid to fly under the EU regulators’ radar.
The CEO warns, “Dozens of patents have already been filed in this field by the big agrochemical corporations like Bayer, BASF, Dow Agrosciences and Monsanto.”
now the EC has a hella lot of ‘power’, and none of the players were elected. some democracy. and the WHO has decided to let loose zillions of those transgenic mosquitoes because: zika.
cliché by now, but just right given your comment.
this is the most recent op-ed on brexit i could find at the guardian, lol: ‘Putin will be rubbing his hands at the prospect of Brexit’
yeah, the EU helped massively create refugees. but wait: switzerlaand and denmark is making them fork over their valuables to “pay for their keep”.
it’s hard to imagine what motivates a bill gates or a soros or HRC. a deep psychic investment in approval from those one deems powerful, important, etc. being in that club. the approval & acceptance of the group covers a multitude of sins. i prefer to put some serious blame on the ivy league (& stanford et al). all these bastards went to harvard, princeton and yale. at least on the politics side. kissinger becomes kissinger…at harvard. i hope princeton did an exorcism on the dorm room that wolfowitz & rumsfeld shared. & having prescott bush for a dad cannot be good for the soul, either. so there’s the socialization component too, for many of them, but not all, from birth (i don’t know enough about bill c. or obama, but politics seems to provide the sort of hoakum, the capitalist snake oil, that “only in america, etc.” yawn. the man from hope. barf.)
part of the appeal of that thoreau quote to me was that it reminded that a capitalist cannot just let a pasture alone. even if it’s “conscious capitalist” whole foods w/their organic seeds. put a walmart there! oops, that’s not part of our lifestyle, so put a whole foods there! can’t leave a pasture alone, can’t leave venezuela alone.
i was temping at a place recently where, kind of by accident, i came across some studies stating that vehicles running on “clean, efficient” “natural” gas are no more efficient than their more traditional diesel counterparts in the long haul transport sector (e.g., semis; btw, all the metro buses in in D.C. area run on “clean efficient natural gas.”) funny, cuz there was a massive push into NG by obama admin, incl. the unspeakable practice of hydrofracking. they sold this BS under the mantra of efficiency. but it was not & is not possible for your capitalist to just leave the damn gas in the ground.
robin & his merry marxist ‘hood will have no place to hide when big capital gets thru w/the planet. Arden will be chopped down. no forest that you can just, you know, share. w/o worrying about who it belongs to. a big portion of that capitalist garbage floating around the ocean is the packaging by which a capitalist labels some product as “theirs.” This lettuce is Del Monte, this pen is Bic, these plastic cups are Dixie, these plastic bags all contained Staples brand office products, not, heaven forfend, a competitor brand. somehow, i’m sure, when the enviro nightmare fully descends on us, the capitalists will find a way to blame the commies, or ISIS, or the chinese w/their currency manipulation, or the corruption of local gov’ts,
i absolutely agree with your first paragraph, and that the bubble one’s in, whether chosen or born to, has a hella lot to do with it. ( i love your wolfie/rummy/kissinger rant, too.) but i have to go with alice miller’s theories (arthur silber’s alt site has loads of her work) and related attachment theory issues (failure to develop a conscience), but that’s a far longer subject, but again: seeking outside chosen group approval would fit the same theories in a way: no core understandings of self, no true liberation from authority figures, instead…becoming one of them, whether in revenge or simple expedience. remember, too, those who seek wealth and power never get enough of it, and it ain’t about ‘happiness’.
yep to ‘brands’ and packaging. to me, here, it’s those fucking walmart bags hanging in barbed wire everywhere from our valley to cortez (home of walmart supercenter, killed the mom and pop specialty stores long ago): white, blue, what’s next? blood red?
er…they’re blamin’ em already, dear. gotta go make some burritos; i’ll be back (she warned).
well, my “it’s the ivy league!” theory of the origins of evil can be viewed complementarily w/other perspectives. certainly alice miller. big piles of loot & the kids automatically getting into all the right clubs & parties are big motivators too. there are multiple reasons. at certain levels of the strata of class society, not at the very top or bottom for sure, all of your class mates, as it were, lie to each other and reinforce their group & peer beliefs and identity. you don’t have to lie to yourself constantly; your peers will do that for you, w/copious aid from mainstream narratives & media, and everybody’s family says The Most Important Thing is taking care of your own family, which one can’t do by watching RT & reading demotivating hippy garbage. so you play the game & live the lies for hope of happiness in the private life of love & kids. the habits of deference to authority & thinking only in cliches are embraced at the mother’s breast and at Holy Mother Church’s altar.
i realize that this description more aptly applies to the middle, maybe upper middle, manager in The System, some desk jockey at the Dept of Ed who really believes in The Mission, or a similar somebody working away in the belief that Lockheed really protects America.
yeah too much time today!
aw, jeez; now you’ve pinged for me Pushy Parents enrolling their chirren at birth into high-powered nursery schools for the Exceptional™, and the suicides of kids who have been pressured for so long…they finally pop. goddam.
pluto over yonder had (i hope) snarked on one of my posts about the level of happy shining well-adjusted people who only…well, i forget really. but i’d forgotten this quote anthony freda uses when he sends me his artwork:
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
and that’s why we are the oddities in this sick society: we feel that knowing…is preferable to…not knowing, even though there may not be any such things as Absolute Truth, we know lies for Empire when we see them. imo, the nibbles of truth on ‘liberal’ msm are almost the worst.
no work today? i’m glad. you know so many things that i don’t, and after dinner, more on your other comment, bless your heart.
tiger cub’s first victim is tiger mom? nah, usually it’s their own self.
one of my friends on FB posted a link to an npr piece on “dealing w/the introverted child.” ugh. so much fetishizing the values of The Boss, the organization of one’s time & emotional life around the demands of the employer. funny if you start w/that as the problem how the needs of the “introverted child” look a little different. looking at the emotional life of one’s child thru the prism of future employment prospects is some serious child abuse.
nice jiddu k quote.
ahh, your follow up comment reminded me why i mentioned that about the US stuffing europe’s gov’ts w/”ex” nazis. the refugee crisis itself is the clearest example of “european values.” the post ww2 happy european welfare state is just a blip in history and not gonna last. it was always a bribe anyway, a temporary bribe to soothe the passions against capitalism justly inflamed by the world war. now europe can get back to what it’s really known for: raping africa, concentrated labor in field & factory. w/no small encouragement from nuncle sam. (just how smart is it to have germany & japan remilitarizing? where the hell do these people come from that think giving the germans more guns is a good idea?)
oh lard, npr just stated that US & Rooskie pilots are communicating w/each other over the air space of syria…to avoid any…misunderstandings…
NPR is announcing what was an obvious requirement from the nature of the air space from the beginning. It’s the Turkish pilots who are not yet part of that alliance — that’s what all of Kerry’s negotiation is about–keeping Turkey and Saudi Arabia from allowing a DAESH breakout.
The first intelligence chief of the Deutshe Bundesrepublik was an ex-Nazi and not just any ex-Nazi, one who with Allen Dulles arranged a weird wrinkle in the Nazi surrender in Italy. For more on this see, David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.
turkey’s not part of NATO?
turkey’s a nato member. thd seem to mean not part of the Russia/US allies group (UK, france, maybe? dunno the others) that was allegedly to coordinate bombing sorties. seems russia can’t (or couldn’t by the 14th) even get them to in order to drop relief supplies. sauds helping bomb syria, not just yemen? i’ve seen them (ahem) threaten to send in ground troops, but it’s so complex i’ve kinda bailed out on the whole affair. but at the NYT link: note kerry reacting to something he claims to have heard lavrov had said. how diplomatic.
but see, here we are again: ‘US airstrikes target Islamic State militants in Libya’; Dozens of deaths reported from strikes said to have targeted senior Isis operative linked to beach massacre in Tunisia
the russia-bashing in that guardian article is really something else. boy that bad vlad sure is bad. and crafty. the EU represents these “universal” values. snort. (why do you have so many enemies then?) that said, seems likely that putin is doing some underhanded things (stuff the US does all the time of course); they’d be stupid not to from a certain viewpoint. and the RT newscast does sometimes seem to gloat about the anti-EU campaign in Britain (or the Scottish independence referendum and the like), even to show some schadenfreude that the EU is getting its deserts thru the refugee crisis. but russia ain’t shipping these movements guns whatever their financial and moral support. and of course if the EU wasn’t allowing itself to be used as a pawn by the US, Putin & all the russian oligarchs would be more than happy to work w/the common market rather than a bunch of individual national markets. that said, i don’t have much of an opinion on brexit. kind of meh about it. WTO rules & TTP-type stuff still exists after all. it’s kind of moving the pieces around in the organizational flow chart. or is it more than that? making & breaking of deals & trade blocs as sort of jockeying for position before The Big One erupts, like before ww1?
as if marine le pen hanging out w/obama or cameron would be an improvement over putin! double snort. (cameron’s anothern. like american ivy league turds, oxonian.)
of coure vlad is; he’s a roosian oligarch hisownsef, and former kgb.
i’m enjoying your stream-of-consciousness pings so well, jason. but for tonight, i’m played out. (i’ve been working on a post about the panther documentary between times).
it looks as though THD has answered my shofar call! sleep well, i hope you have tomorrow off as well; i’ll respond then. and i’ll explain if i can remember…why joni’s song was so prescient. for tonight:
Russia is about to help the US pull its Middle Eastern chestnuts out of the fire and Iran will be assisting. The Assistant Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs seems for the moment to becoming more agreeable to reality, the alternative being a bigger mess before Inauguration Day 2017. The Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs apparently has not. The media campaign against Russia and Putin continues in an obvious and phony way. The provocative actions on Russia’s periphery continue, with the justification being reports and intelligence of Russia’s aggressiveness–reports and intelligence from whom, by the way? The US media and the US intelligence community. Primarily, no doubt, Victoria Nuland’s stenographers. Greenlighting Ukraine apparently is the price for the moderate silence of Nuland’s in-laws on other matters. The politics of the permanent government who will still have their jobs after January 2017 is one of the unrecognized difficulties of the Presidency. Try as he might, Trump will not be able to shout “You’re fired!” to foreign service officers willy-nilly without the backup of Congress. And if he gets that backup, the international relations of the empire will descend into chaos. That dynamic is quietly present in every administration. The ironic transparency of the Obama administration is that we now know how Victoria Nuland influences US foreign policy; we have heard her and Geoffrey Pyatt coordinate a coup.
The bottom line for Putin in Ukraine are the human rights of ethnic Russians in Donbass and the security of the port at Sebastapol. Russia reacts when those are threatened. And Sebastapol is more non-negotiable than Donbass.
For the rest of Ukraine, the right wing has to invoke Ukrainian nationalism and claims to Donbass in order to claim political power. In order to motivate other Ukrainians they have to constantly invoke fear of Russian seizure of all of Ukraine. The Minsk agreement, by reducing tensions in Donbass, sucked the air out of that paranoid nationalism on the right. So, now they want another coup to install Svoboda. I don’t think Nuland is liking this turn of events; your title likely gets to her mood as well. Folks like Svoboda and Le Pen and UKIP and the German parties to the right of Merkel and the current Hungarian government are not that great for transnational corporations. A powerful Right Sector or Svoboda government in Kiev would not necessarily want in NATO, the European Union, and definitely not the Eurozone after seeing the treatment of Greece.
Thanks for highlighting what the Western media did not. poor Tony Scalia being laid to rest and all that. Not to mention the quadrennial circus.
yep, the bureaucracy & continuinty of gov’t thru the players in the bureacracy. trump mouthed off about how on day one he’ll shoot down obama’s iran deal. as if. money will be flying around in iran like you wouldn’t believe. ain’t nobody gonna put a stop to that and trump knows it.
Just wait until China’s New Silk Road infrastructure becomes the new bubble for Western investors. Money will be flowing into Iran, the -stans, Turkey, Ukraine, and even Russia. The PNAC veterans caught in Mackinder-thinking will be having hissy fits and wanting to control dollar outflows from the US. How you know the empire is slowly slipping away. But will the future world be unipolar around China, or some form of multipolar. It is different patterns of multipolarity that are either stable or instable. Instable forms bring more frequent conflict. The notion of a sole superpower is a form that is notoriously unstable and generates frequent conflict. A twenty-five year run for the US is really quite remarkable, given how determined George W. Bush was to expend absolutely all of US power in the Middle East and Central Asia. The Bush-Cheney-PNAC team tried their best to go for broke. They almost succeeded. But countries that operate in their own currencies have a difficulty actually going for broke. They really have to work hard at that particular form of folly.
Just checking
needn’t bother; i’d been enjoying that you seemed to have moved on to greener pastures with ‘the Moonies’, wayoutwest.
I see that some people are still moon-eyed about the wonders of the Chinese Silk Road project but I doubt there will be any Western investment in this Chinese market penetration/extraction scheme that also protects their flow of resources from possible naval interdiction.
What products come out of China initially on these trains was seen in their first shipment to Europe last Xmas, cheap plastic Xmas junk, and now with their first delivery to Iran a few days ago, cheap consumer junk that the Iranians already were complaining about because it had already began the destruction of local production of consumer goods. The deal with China to buy Iranian oil required them to accept shipments of this junk and like most of China’s customers they have no power to stop this market penetration, see Africa.
The Chinese trade with the US started in the late ’70s with low cost but decent quality machine tools, now much of our high value manufacturing is done in China along with the cheap consumer goods and shipped in containers to the US with most containers returning empty except for some filled with two commodities being mined here, scrap metal and paper. We’re assisting their growth by exporting our trees and the dismantled skeleton of our industrial base.
China’s new developing world trading partners have more resources, than the US, to offer in trade for Chinese dominance of their consumer and eventually industrial markets and they will get shiny new infrastructure to speed the extraction of their resources. Some elites will profit handsomely from this extraction but few of the working people in these countries will see many benefits.
please understand that i really don’t want you here, peter. it’s not that i want an echo agreement-chamber, but i seriously haven’t cared for the way you’ve derailed so many threads here by latching on to some small bit or other. we could put it to a vote. oh wait: this really isn’t a true democracy here, is it?
why wouldn’t a svoboda/right sector govt. in ukraine want to become a NATO member? yeppers, nuland would see my title as just this. either the NYT or Wapo had finally (ahem) acknowledged the neo-nazis once last year (guess they got told to get with the program). will that change is the larger question.
readout of kerry’s side conversation w/ poroshenko at #munich, lol:
“The following is attributable to Spokesperson John Kirby:
The Secretary reaffirmed the strong support of the United States for full implementation of the Minsk agreement. He urged unity among Ukraine’s leaders, and faster progress on reform and against corruption, especially those urgent steps recommended by the IMF.”
i’d have sworn i used to embed her tweets, but it may be that the state dept. cut off her account. now i did find a EURpress office account, no fun at all, and a #Nuland hashtag that even john kirby had used. ooof, she take a lotta drubbing! but geoffrey pyatt and his retweets, for instance:
(5 hrs ago)
will no one rid us of the kagan family? kagan pere was (is? can’t keep up w/that brood of vipers.) a prof of classical history at Yale where he peddled to the kennedys and others that Athens vs Sparta parallels the freedom-loving Yanks vs. the godless red commie, w/ “father knows best” and “leave it to the beav” as our Dionysiac festivals, the golden arches our Acropolis & pagan shrines. of course the kennedy circle just lapped such trashy flattery up. (“When Athens colonized a place, they brought democracy & free markets.” verbatim.)
is turkey NATO’s lapdog? or when it comes to the kurds at least, they may not run w/the pack? hard to say.like israel & s. arabia, difficult to know to what extent they can act independently of US diktats.
so Russia bombed an MSF facility or outpost? hmmm….how many has Saudi Arabia, in Yemen? helpfully, the US press ignores that story. very helpful.
—————————————————-
perhaps there is a better way of civilizing men than by slaughtering them by the thousands-Tolstoy, in that thing he wrote
your comedic (re)construction is just killin’ me, jason! ha and ha, i needed that. dunno about turkey; erdogan is even startin’ to embarass the ‘allies’, no? i guess there are several kurdish groups, but yikes, the west has sold them out over and over…and over. oe of the kurdish groups has/had been trying to establish a zapatista-like society, but…in the middle of a war zone. tough gig. dunno who kagan pere was, but that’s the bubble robert was born to/(un)nurtured by, eh?
bureau of investigation has two new reports up. in one, NATO swears 14 terrorists were drone-murdered in afghanistan; the bureau pretty much concluded that they were all civilians. i might put it up when i have time, their other report surprised me a bit, i’d add, but i’ll have to read it again, and it’s longish.
oh god. i feel ill after you got those twits embedded. “state-owned enterprises, graft & corruption…” barf. & doesn’t “major defense exporter” mean “launching pad & war zone for hot war w/Russia?”
Exported defense goods are meant to be bought, not to be used…cough…cough. And then leaders come along and in the spirit of W ask why do we have all this neat stuff that is not being used. Ought we not to use it and show our power in shock and awe. But power is never what actual use of arms winds up showing. Where is that sole superpower that the media was touting during the Clinton Presidency now?
More likely Svoboda would be interested in the legitimacy offered by NATO that the constraints of the EU or the colonialism of the Eurozone. Where exactly do the French National Party and the British National Party stand on NATO. Likely where their Danish counterparts do, and if I am not mistaken, Foggers was one of them–or at least close in policy to the Danish nationalists. All Scandinavian politicians are not alike, and Scandinavian socialism has had a rough time since the assassination of Olaf Palme.
yep, french nationals (at least le pen fille): out of NATO. there are even videos!!! ;-) hold the phone: the sec gen of nato…was a danish nationalist? duz.not.compute. (not to be a thick-wit) did he promote immigrants from the wars being robbed of their valuables? i mean…donating them for their upkeep?
Porkbarrel politics and nuclear reduction agreements. From American Conservative.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/addicted-to-los-alamos/
wow. who could forget O’s budgeting so many billions/trillion to upgrade ‘our’ nukes?
but this a lotta fun (wonder if the western media will…er…discuss it?) hey, guardian, bbc!
‘Just blame Moscow! Declassified papers reveal UK policy of accusing Soviets of everything’
“Declassified papers from the British Cabinet Office have put an end to the long-standing myth of Moscow’s unwillingness to cooperate with the West, revealing the UK’s efforts to blame every problem on Russia.
The papers date back to 1983, when the UK Foreign and Cabinet offices were ecstatic at the outcome of the Madrid review conference on the implementation of the Helsinki Final Act on security and cooperation in Europe.
“… We now have a provisional mandate for a CDE (Conference on Disarmament in Europe) which establishes four basic criteria, all of which have required concession on the part of the Soviet Union and her allies,” officials in Whitehall wrote at the time.
But it was the fourth of the criteria that was the most exciting for the West.
“The fourth [proposal-NG] is a significant breakthrough for the West. It represents recognition for the first time that the West has a legitimate security interest in the whole of the European part of the Soviet Union.”
But although Moscow showed its cooperation, the West wasn’t as eager to be a team player, with one memo indicating how the Soviet Union had failed to gain “a corresponding concession in the exercise of the droit de regard [right of access/inspection] over Western military activities beyond Europe.” The West’s unwillingness to cooperate with Russia didn’t stop there.”, etc.
maybe the zika virus is a blessing in disguise? if everyone is micro-cephalic, maybe we’ll be too stoopid for nuclear pits & the like.
the main takeaway from that article is not really what a waste of $$$$$ all this is, b/c wasting money is not really ever a real issue, but i just point out what a crock of shit the whole notion of a “free market” is.
dudn’t look as though it takes a rocket scientist work in the pits. robots…hmmm. but a great joke, the truth is out there about zika and microcephaly (though the definition/metric of that condition has been narrowed considerably; 32 mm?)
oh, so much ‘debunking’ going on…while it’s huuuuuge headline clickbait. now that’s the free market at work.
32 mm? that’s like the size of my….wrist. kind of like how safe levels of exposure to radiation magically rise after nuclear accidents….
i apologize, jason; 32 cm
mosquito-net the world!
ha. remember what some blogger said they did with bill gates’ mosquito nets? seine fish. small wonder with hunger being what it is. ‘course, fish are getting scarce, and many are toxic. thank gawd for Frankenfish!
“This Is Why the European Union Wants a Friendly Government in Libya’; WikiLeaks reveals the EU wants Libya to attack refugee boat departures.
WikiLeaks released Wednesday a classified report indicating the European Union is pressuring Libya to crack down on refugees.
The report, dated Jan. 29, 2016, was written by Rear Adm. Enrico Credendino of the Italian Navy. Credendino is currently leading the EU’s Operation SOPHIA, a militarized anti-refugee mission in the Mediterranean. In the report on SOPHIA’s progress, Credendino argued European leaders should promote the formation of a “reliable” government in Libya that can crack down on refugee boat departures. [snip]
The report continued, “Indeed, through the capability and capacity building of the Libyan Navy and Coastguard we will be able to give the Libyan authorities something in exchange for their cooperation in tackling the irregular migration issue.”
well, it’s may be one EU reason, but we can be quite sure it’s not the only reason: who’s got the oil, who’s got gadaffi’s billions in gold, who’s controlling the ‘Great man-made river’ his administration had built, etc.
hmmm. this piece seems to indicate…most of it’s long been in ruins, but no one really knows. jayzus, NATO and pals.
what’s that colloquial expression that cuts right to the chase? oh, yes: O, fuck me!
‘Congress Has Removed a Ban on Funding Neo-Nazis From Its Year-End Spending Bill; Under pressure from the Pentagon, Congress has stripped the spending bill of an amendment that prevented funds from falling into the hands of Ukrainian neo-fascist groups.’
ah yes, the other one is: ya just couldn’t even make this shit up!’
‘We’re in a new Cold War’ – Stephen Cohen on mounting US-NATO military on Russia border
it’s a bit dated, but the author scores a goal:
“Minsk 2: Victory for the Transnational Elite in Ukraine?*” by takis fotopoulos, (13.02.2015)